The Best Personalization Services for Magento 2

Did you know that the Magento 2 offers broad possibilities when it comes to personalization? You can individually reach customers, increasing conversion rates. While Magento 2 offers several potent built-in personalization tools that will be dramatically enhanced within the next few years, there are also a bunch of third-party alternatives that provide notable improvements to the default functionality of the platform. In the following article, we explore what Magento 2 personalization services are already available, but before going any further, let’s define the e-commerce trend itself.     

Personalization as a Trend

What is the first thing you think of when it comes to Magento 2 and personalization? It may be a personalized email message or one of the third-party modules that enable customer segmentation (and a corresponding native tool if you are a Magento Commerce user). Everything depends on your past experiences related to the interaction with your clients. However, all such tools are a little bit limited since they are either bound to groups of people or bobtailed from the perspective of provided features. Therefore, let’s define the term personalization to sift out ashes from cinders.

The definition of personalization

In its essence, personalization is the process of tailoring e-commerce store pages to individual characteristics or preferences of a user. The purpose of a customer segmentation introduced in Magento 2 is the same. Although this process is not as precise as individual personalization requires, you can rely upon customer segments to create specific output per individual. Let’s take a look at the purpose of the Magento 2 personalization.   

Personalization goals and benefits

This e-commerce trend tends to change digital sales forever. Its core goal is to provide an individual shopping experience to every buyer. Thus, personalization becomes an integral part of one-to-one marketing. You use the related tools and features to tailor your store pages to target each individual consumer according to their particular preferences. 

As you can see, personalization is about meeting the customer’s needs on an individual level more effectively and efficiently. It results in the following achievements: 

• Faster and easier interactions;
• Better customer satisfaction;
• Higher possibility of repeat visits.

As a store merchant, you can benefit from personalized customer service due to rising sales. The better you treat your buyers, the more loyal they become. The more attentive to their desires you are, the more money they spend on your Magento 2 website.

Personalization mechanisms & tools

First of all, the personalization tools rely on cookies as the most popular way to get personal data when a user visits a page. However, Google changed the default way cookies were treated for years. If you didn’t know that, check this article: Magento 2 SameSite Cookie Guide. As for other technologies behind personalization for Magento 2 and other platforms, they include:

• Profiling. This term is associated with the process of extrapolating information about a customer based on known tendencies. The system relies upon data collected from several different websites before a user starts interactions with your store.
• Collaborative Filtering. This approach lets the system apply a filter to data from various sites, selecting only the relevant information that is necessary for creating an individual e-commerce experience on your store.
• Data Analysis. The process of inspecting, transforming, and modeling data provides the system with the ability to discover useful information about a customer and make informed decisions towards personalizing the provided shopping experience. Various data analysis tools are often used to predict likely interactions and tailor web pages according to the expected customer’s interests. 
• Artificial Intelligence. AI is a new marketing trend that opens endless possibilities when it comes to the personalization for Magento 2 and other platforms. It enables the system to learn from past experiences, adjusting to new cases better and better. Using deep learning and natural language processing, the system accomplishes personalization by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in it. The more it works, the more personalized experience users get.

The technologies above power the following personalization tools:

• Product Recommendations. A block with related products, cross-sells, upsells, bestsellers, or anything else is added to a store page.
• Content. Text, images, and videos from your store pages vary depending on the individual preferences of a buyer.
• Emails. A personalized email is sent to a customer.
• Pop-ups. A personalized pop-up message is displayed on your website.
• Design Changes. Some service providers offer personalized design changes for individuals, including personalized page layouts, colors, fonts, etc.

Major concerns

All significant concerns related to personalization are based on the essence of the process. You cannot tailor the look of your e-commerce store pages according to individual preferences without gathering and processing personal information. Thus, privacy issues are a significant concern related to personalization, no matter whether it is Magento 2 or another platform. 

Specialists all over the globe try to alleviate the concerns of individuals caused by the use of their private data for personalization. An international advocacy group – Personalization Consortium – supervises the development of safe one-to-one marketing practices. However, the consortium can only establish ethical information and privacy management objectives but not restrict platforms that provide personalization services from data abuse. 

The group issued a suggestion that enterprises should inform people about the use of their data. At the same time, the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU’s new data protection legislation, made personalization safer since customers now have more rights and impact mechanisms on the platforms that collect their individual information. 

Everyone knows how frustrating reentering information that has already been supplied is. Therefore, it is not a surprise that most people find it helpful to have websites retain their data for providing individual and simplified experiences. Due to reliable control mechanisms, such processes become safer than ever before, alleviating concerns regarding personalization.

Core Magento 2 Personalization Services

Now, when you know what personalization is, let’s take a look at the key Magento 2 personalization services. Below, we describe both native and third-party solutions. 

Adobe Sensei

Adobe Sensei is a robust tool that streamlines AI and machine learning to deliver top-notch services and advanced personalization to Magento 2. Below, we shed light on the mechanisms that are already built into our e-commerce platform, as well as ones that might be added soon.

Product Recommendations

Last year, Adobe announced a robust product roadmap to augment Magento 2 Commerce. It was planned to add enterprise-grade capabilities to empower merchants to deliver superior shopping experiences. Product Recommendations powered by Adobe Sensei became one of the new features. With artificial intelligence and machine learning under the hood, this tool enables brands to leverage customer information to deliver personalized experiences based on real-time relevance.

According to Adobe, well-tailored product recommendations in retail can increase sales by up to 30 percent. When it comes to multi-brand marketplaces, this number is even higher. The Magento 2 product recommendations feature helps to achieve this goal due to the following benefits:

• Instantaneous data collection;
• Immediate shopper behavior analysis;
• Personalized product recommendations;
• Product recommendations on relevant store pages;
• Global exclusion categories based on inventory or pricing levels;
• Flexible product recommendations widgets.

Under the hood

As you can see, the Product Recommendations tool is a powerful personalization feature available in Magento 2 Commerce. You can leverage it to stimulate shopper engagement, increase conversions, and, as a result, boost sales.

From the perspective of a shopping experience, Product Recommendations are displayed on your e-commerce storefront as various page elements. For instance, you can leverage the tool to provide Magento 2 personalization via “Customers who viewed this also viewed” or “Recommended for you” blocks.

As we’ve just mentioned, Adobe Sensei powers Product Recommendations. It performs an in-depth analysis of aggregated shopper data, streamlining AI and machine-learning algorithms. This process results in highly engaging and personalized experiences your shoppers participate in every time they visit your Magento 2 website.

However, Product Recommendations are not built into Magento 2 as a simple module. The tool is deployed as a SaaS service with several nuances. Thus, the frontend side consists of two elements: the event collector and the recommendations layout template. As for the backend side, its structure contains the following three components: Data Services, SaaS Export Module, and Admin UI. As you might have already guessed, this complexity is caused by the necessity to perform the Adobe Sensei intelligence services on the external SaaS platform.

However, everything is much more straightforward from the merchant perspective. You install and configure the product recommendation modules. Next, your storefront starts monitoring the behavior of your customers. It sends the data to Adobe Sensei that processes it along with your catalog data. The SaaS system creates the best product associations, helping you implement Magento 2 personalization in all its glory. As a merchant, you can create, manage, and deploy product recommendation blocks. All the necessary tools are available right in your Magento 2 admin.

Magento 2 Product Recommendations are based on the following two types of data: behavioral and catalog. The former is related to a shopper’s interactions with your storefront: product views, cart items, purchases, etc. Note that neither Magento nor Adobe Sensei collects personally identifiable information. The letter is related to product information: name, price, availability, etc.

You can find the full Product Recommendations workflow here: Magento 2 Personalization: Product Recommendations.

Other Adobe Sensei services

Although the built-in Magento 2 personalization is represented by Product Recommendations only, we think that it is only the beginning of a long journey. Therefore, let’s learn more about other Adobe Sensei services. We believe that one day they will also be connected to Magento 2 by default, helping merchants bring a personal touch to every customer experience.

The first Sensei-powered set of tools is called Content Intelligence. It is developed to better understand and manipulate images for more efficient reuse and personalization. Content Intelligence lets you enhance the following directions:

• Image content – to add image descriptors automatically; 
• Image quality – to adjust color harmony, field depth, rule of thirds, etc;
• Content position – to make images more suitable for brand specifications and channel requirements; 
• Video content – to generate action descriptors and other metadata.

Experience Intelligence is another set of tools that incorporate Adobe Sensei. Being a part of Adobe Experience Cloud, it offers even more potent tools developed to deliver personalized and optimized customer experience. Experience Intelligence contains Attribution AI services that help you work in the following areas: 

• Marketing – to calculate the incremental impact of media: owned, earned, and paid;
• Cross-channel campaigns – to allocate additional spends with every channel and campaign performance in mind; 
• Customer management – to better understand your customers and discover their types your marketing channels are converting; 

Adobe Sensei also powers several Customer AI services, which, in their turn, are designed to implement more precise Magento 2 personalization, enriching customer profiles with intelligent attributes. You can leverage:

• Churn propensity – to detect customers who are going to cancel your service; 
• Conversion propensity – to apply additional personalization to the customer journey, driving conversion;
• Upsell propensity – to target offers to the right customers when they really need them.

As for the Journey AI services, which also incorporate Adobe Sensei, they help to optimize the design and delivery of customer journeys. The corresponding tools bring AI-driven optimization with marketer-defined rules to the game. As a result, you can achieve optimal and, what’s even more critical, personalized send time for emails. Besides, it is possible to enhance user engagement with the help of predictive insights related to the possible interactions with the messages you send. Last but not least, you can find an individual messaging threshold to keep customers engaged and avoid unsubscriptions.

You can find more information about Adobe Sensei here: Creativity. Workflows. Experiences.

Nosto

Nosto is the most notable rival of Adobe Sensei when it comes to Magento 2 personalization. The system lets merchants maintain shopping experiences that create individual customer journeys. The Nosto Commerce Experience Platform is designed to enable fully personalized e-commerce experiences with the minimum effort. The system offers fine-tuned control of merchandising rules. As a merchant, you get outstanding flexibility in managing product recommendations and other content, including triggered overlays and pop-ups, personalized category pages, and many more.

It is also worth mentioning that Nosto is a Magento Premier Technology Partner. It means that the technology is well-tailored for the Magento 2 platform. It analyzes hundreds of thousands of data points across an entire storefront in real-time. As a result, you can reach the highest possible level of personalization. 

Nosto offers a patented technology that combines proprietary algorithms and big data analytics to deliver the most precise personalization for product recommendations. It automatically predicts the best products that you can offer to each customer based on a moment-by-moment analysis of their shopping behavior. 

Products and tools

Nosto provides the following products to enable the advanced Magento 2 personalization:

• Onsite Product Recommendations – provide store visitors with individual product recommendation;
• Onsite Content Personalization – display personalized content for your customers;
• Segmentation & Insights – use segments to divide customers into groups and better leverage insights;
• Facebook & Instagram Ads – leverage personalized ads on social media services;
• Onsite Pop-ups – rich your store visitors with personalized onsite pop-ups;
• Personalized Emails – target your customers with personalized messages;
• In-Store & Mobile App Personalization – provide individual experience across all devices.

Benefits and advantages 

Nosto’s Artificial Intelligence is one of the fundamental mechanisms behind the delivered Magento 2 personalization. The platform’s Intelligence Engine monitors your entire storefront and analyzes all interactions that take place there. With all the information collected and analyzed, Nosto provides a deep understanding of every visitor. The platform relies on patented Machine Learning algorithms and statistical techniques. With these tools, it predicts and delivers the most relevant personalized experiences in real-time. Thus, you increase customer engagement and maximize your revenue potential in a fully automated mode!

Also, note that the platform is easy to use. It lets you deploy new campaigns and modify existing ones in a new york minute. Nosto offers a user interface designed with merchants in mind. Its sophisticated tooling provides total control over merchandising rules so that it is possible to tailor personalization algorithms to your specific business needs without hiring an IT department.

Fast and safe deployment is another benefit of Nosto. The platform offers the number-one Magento 2 personalization solution used by top businesses all over the globe. Its patented implementation methods stand guard over risk-free deployment and rapid go-to-market stage. 

The advanced integrability of Nosto lets you combine data from across all your e-commerce tools, achieving even more precise Magento 2 personalization. 

Magento 2 personalization

As for the Magento-exclusive features, Nosto also knows how to impress both merchants and their customers. The platform seamlessly operates across any product catalog. Even the most prominent e-commerce websites are not an obstacle that divides merchants from delivering individual shopping journeys. At the same time, the number of customers doesn’t matter. Even the most substantial traffic is analyzed and leveraged for achieving personalization goals.

Fast time-to-market is Nosto’s advantage over many similar solutions. With this Magento 2 personalization platform, you can get started within a matter of minutes, bypassing complicated backend integrations.

Support for offline shopping data is what makes Nosto unique and extremely powerful. You can deliver the best possible Magento 2 personalization, converting offline shopping information into the online data. It leads to a complete retail personalization everyone wants.

You can find more information about Nosto here:

Get Nosto Magento 2 Application

Other Magento 2 Personalization Solutions

While the Magento 2 personalization platforms mentioned above are the most popular solutions on the market, several other tools are worth your attention. Let’s take a look at the key rivals of Adobe Sensei and Nostro.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield also lets you enforce your Magento 2 website with the latest personalization technologies. The platform offers an agility environment that provides the ability to experiment more and run personalization at scale. Since Dynamic Yield is a platform-gnostic solution, you can leverage it not only with your e-commerce websites but also other channels, achieving maximum performance with your personalization strategies. What exact features does it offer?

Dynamic Yield lets you personalize every shopper’s interaction across the entire customer journey, delivering individual experience across web, mobile, email, and ads. The system works in the following directions:

• Static Content. You can dynamically change static content on your website (banners, CTA buttons, promotional areas, and more), replacing it with a set of personalized experiences.
• Page Layout. Dynamic Yield enables real-time page layout changes according to the preferences of your shoppers. The system can rearrange a page grid, menu items, and categories automatically.
• Product Carousels. Of course, the most prominent Magento 2 personalization tool is supported. The system lets you leverage product carousels to deliver a unique customer journey to every buyer. You can also leverage other similar page elements, including multi-item banners.
• Triggers. You can set triggers to launch event-based personalized messages on your Magento 2 website and across different channels.
• Consistent Experience. Dynamic Yield allows personalizing not just individual touchpoints, but the entire customer journey. The system collects data across independent channels, creating one cohesive experience.

As you can see, the system offers a unified personalization technology suite that covers all your needs. You can quickly gain access to an admin-friendly campaign creation workflow that offers numerous prebuilt, customizable templates. Create, manage, and launch personalization campaigns of any complexity for your Magento 2 website with ease.

Due to the results-focused approach and algorithmic decisioning engine, Dynamic Yield allows measuring the real impact of all digital interaction along the entire shopping journey. At the same time, you can enhance the productivity of this Magento 2 personalization solution using its open architecture. Connect ESPs, DMPs, CDPs, Tag Managers, and other e-commerce tools to make more efficient campaigns. Also, you can rely on the Improved Import & Export extension to enable the integration of Magento 2 and other systems.

To connect your e-commerce website to the platform, use the Dynamic Yield’s Magento extension. The tool automatically sends every action that takes place on your storefront to Dynamic Yield’s personalization engine. All visitor activities are captured and transferred to the external system. The Magento 2 personalization solution tracks page visits, product interactions, and other data necessary to optimize and personalize experiences across all marketing channels. Follow the link below for further information: 

Dynamic Yield Magento 2 Personalization Engine

Recolize 

The Recolize personalization system offers a plug-and-play solution for Magento 2. The platform enables precise product recommendations via widgets. The Magento 2 extension tracks various user interactions with your storefront to generate personalized shopping experiences for your customers in real-time. 

As a Magento 2 merchant, you can add as many product carousels with individual offers as you need. The Recolize platform offers 300 free clicks per month, so the service may be less expensive than its rivals. However, it depends on the size of your website and traffic. 

The Magento 2 personalization solution by Recolize covers numerous areas of your e-commerce store. It provides the ability to show personalized products, cross-sells, up-sells, bestsellers, or last viewed products (see the image below). The number of recommendation carousels is unlimited. Furthermore, you can add them to every page of your e-commerce website and go beyond it to a blog, company website, or seasonal landing page.

Recolize is extremely easy to configure. It is only necessary to copy your store address to the system, and it will optimize recommendations for it. You can also define various rules to make the output more personalized. 

Besides, this Magento 2 personalization solution provides the ability to analyze the performance of every store page in real-time. Thus, you can easily enhance the efficiency of your recommendations. For more information, follow this link:

Get Recolize Magento 2 Personalization Extension 

TargetBay 

Alternatively, you can connect your Magento 2 store with TargetBay to enable personalized experiences for your customers. The platform offers four simple e-commerce personalization tools. First of all, you can leverage email personalization and automation, which is an essential strategy for reaching your customers. The platform provides a drag-and-drop email builder, trigger-based automated messages, abandoned cart reminders, back-in-stock and price-drop emails, etc. You can create various touchpoints with TargetBay, building a smooth relationship with your customers, and avoiding spam.

Behavioral pop-ups represent another area of Magento 2 personalization that TargetBay introduces. For instance, you can show personalized pop-ups when a customer is going to leave a cart with products on your website. The system lets you reduce exit intent by using messages with the right incentive based on customer behavior. And the pop-ups are easy to configure!

And of course, you can leverage product recommendations to personalize your Magento 2 store and the shopping journey it offers. The system lets you display preferred products across your website. Note that it is possible to customize the way widgets with items look, making them suitable for your brand identity. Besides, TargetBay allows adding product recommendations to messages and pop-ups.

You can also leverage the service to make use of customer reviews, building your brand credibility. TargetBay Reviews & QA provide the ability to automate the review collection. It dramatically simplifies the life of your buyers by letting them send reviews through emails. As a store administrator, you can edit and moderate reviews to stop spammers. Other features that enhance your work with customer reviews include Google rich snippets, in-line HTML (search engine visibility), QA sections, etc.
You can find more information about the Magento 2 TargetBay personalization services here:

Get TaregetBay Magento 2 Personalization Extension

Segmentify

Segmentify offers omnichannel personalization. The platform combines data across multiple channels to provide the most accurate customer insights. Next, Segmentify makes personalized product recommendations for your Magento 2 store. Besides, the system also offers personalized search, emails, push notifications, and segments. You can get the most in-depth information about your store visitors with real-time conversion analytics.

Segmentify empowers its algorithms with machine-learning technologies, real-time insights, and buyer behavior results. As a result, you get perfectly tailored product recommendations. 

As for the personalized search functionality, it lets you optimize the provided results following the customer’s specific interests. 

Besides, you can send personalized emails based on a customer’s browsing history on your Magento 2 website. Inform shoppers about price drops, back-in-stock items, and promotions on an individual basis via personalized messages.

Personalized push notifications let you stay connected with your customers across multiple platforms. Segmentify provides the ability to retarget your customers using various messages tailored according to individual preferences.

As for the in-depth segmentation, it lets you push Magento 2 personalization to an entirely new level. Segmentify enables you to combine real-time omnichannel browser and buyer behavior based on various customer segments to deliver highly-personalized online experiences. You can also rely on real-time analytics to make well-informed decisions regarding the personalization strategies you implement.

For further information about the Magento 2 Segmentify personalization, follow this link:

Get Segmentify Magento 2 Personalization Tools

ARM Treasure Data

Treasure Data seems another valuable personalization platform for Magento 2. It works with numerous data points, including online, offline, and IoT devices, to create individual customer experiences. Thus, you can collect data not only from your Magento 2 website but the entire organization, discovering immediate insights.

First of all, Treasure Data lets you fine-tune your shoppers by creating precise customer segments. Due to the heavy involvement of machine learning, you continually improve segmentation.

Another feature that lets you better reach your clients is AI-powered real-time insights. Treasure Data monitors an individual’s history, preferences, and behavior, delivering more targeted offers across multiple channels as a result. It leads to the personalized omnichannel customer experience that increases sales.

From the perspective of Magento 2 personalization, Treasure Data enables individual product recommendations, including more precise cross-sells and upsells. You can keep customers engaged even after they make a purchase. At the same time, a better understanding of customer preferences may help you prioritize new store features as well as test pricing strategies.

The system connects all possible customer touchpoints to deliver relevant experiences at scale. It unifies data from numerous points to personalize interactions and increase engagement. You can leverage not only such valuable sources of information as IoT devices but also get fine-grained behavioral data from games. All these features dramatically improve user acquisition, retention, and monetization if properly implemented. You can read more about Treasure Data here:

Get Treasure Data Magento 2 Personalization Solutions

Final Words

As you can see, personalization mechanisms are available in Magento 2 by default if you use its Commerce version. If you are an Open Source merchant, it is possible to leverage one of the numerous reliable alternatives that have different prices and functionalities. While some services focus on personalized product recommendations only, others deliver the full spectrum of personalization tools, including emails, pop-ups, search, and many more. Also, note that some platforms may be oriented only towards your e-commerce website, but you can easily find omnichannel platform-agnostic giants.